10 Things You Might Not Have Known About The Simpsons

The Simpsons has been a television institution for nearly 30 years. Since its debut on Fox in 1989, the series has accumulated a mountain of awards, worldwide acclaim, and an empire of merchandise. As the longest-running scripted show on TV, it's no surprise that the show's history is littered with interesting anecdotes, loads of cultural references, bizarre guest stars, offbeat writers, wild fan theories, and even a bit of drama. Dig a bit deeper into the history of television's favorite animated family with 10 things you might not have known about The Simpsons.

1. IT’S IVY LEAGUE COMEDY AT ITS FINEST.

The folks behind The Simpsons are smart. Incredibly smart. One look through the writers and producers who have passed through the show reveals graduates, scholars, and professors from some of the best universities on the planet. And many of them didn’t start out by studying writing.

Al Jean, who has been the show’s executive producer on more than 400 episodes, began studying mathematics at Harvard when he was just 16. Writer Jeff Westbrook was an algorithm researcher and attended both Harvard and Princeton before becoming a professor at Yale. Writer David X. Cohen graduated from Harvard with a physics degree and University of California, Berkeley with an M.S. in computer science. And this is just a sample of the brain power it takes to bring The Simpsons to life.

2. ONLY GOD HAS FIVE FINGERS.

The jaundiced residents of Springfield—like most other cartoon characters—are notable for only possessing eight fingers and eight toes. It’s an animation tradition, but one character bucks that trend: God. In the episode “Homer the Heretic,” Homer meets the big cheese, who sports a long white beard, flowing robe, and the standard five fingers on each hand. Just one of the perks of being in charge.

There is one inconsistency, though: Jesus is actually depicted with five fingers in the episode “Thank God It’s Doomsday,” but in subsequent appearances, he’s back to four. Whether this is some profound message or a simple animator slip-up is up to your own interpretation.

3. “KAMP KRUSTY” WAS ORIGINALLY ENVISIONED AS THE SIMPSONS MOVIE.

Though The Simpsons Movie premiered 20 years after the family debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show, the idea of doing a film was being floated during the show’s early days. The episode “Kamp Krusty,” from the show’s fourth season, was originally batted around as a potential plot for a film. In the episode, Bart, Lisa, and the other kids of Springfield go to Krusty the Clown’s shoddy sleepaway camp for the summer while Homer and Marge stay behind to rekindle their marriage.

According to the DVD commentary, a feature-length script never came together. In fact, the writers had a hard enough time stretching the story out to a standard episode length, so an 80 or 90 minute film was out of the question.

4. THE SIMPSONS GOT INTO A PUBLIC WAR WITH THE BUSH FAMILY.

The very unlikely war between The Simpsons and the Bushes began in a 1990 issue of People Magazine, when then-First Lady Barbara Bush said of the show, “It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen.” Not looking to let that jab go unanswered, TheSimpsons writing staff penned a pointed response to Mrs. Bush, but they wrote the letter in character as Marge Simpson.

The letter takes some good-natured shots at Mrs. Bush and pleasantly scolds her for the critique, including the line, “Ma'am, if we're the dumbest thing you ever saw, Washington must be a good deal different than what they teach me at the current events group at the church.”

The war was over … for a few months. Speaking at a convention for religious broadcasters in 1992, President George H.W. Bush vowed to strengthen American families, to make them "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons."

A year later, Bush was out, Clinton was in, and it seemed like The Simpsons—which would eventually triple the length of The Waltons' nine-season run—could move on. Well the show wasn’t done with the former First Family yet.

In the episode “Two Bad Neighbors,” the Bushes move across the street from the Simpsons, and the former president engages in a battle of wits with Homer and Bart (and ends up with a rainbow wig glued to his head). Though the ex-president didn’t voice the character, it provided a definitive end to the feud, as the family eventually drove the Bushes out of Springfield through the same idiotic behavior Barbara Bush derided years earlier.

5. MATT GROENING REMOVED HIS NAME FROM THE EPISODE “A STAR IS BURNS.”

For a show that’s been on the air for close to 30 years, The Simpsons hasn’t endured much public drama outside of the occasional cast salary negotiations. But one of the show’s most memorable feuds went straight to the press, and it concerned the 1995 episode “A Star is Burns,” which featured the character Jay Sherman (voiced by John Lovitz) from the series The Critic coming to Springfield.

Feeling that the episode was just a cheap crossover, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening removed his name from the episode’s opening credits, the first and only time his name wasn’t associated with the series. This led to a very brief—but surprisingly brutal—war of words between Groening and executive producer James L. Brooks.

"The two reasons I am opposed to this crossover is that I don't want any credit or blame for The Critic and I feel this (encroachment of another cartoon character) violates the Simpsons' universe," Groening told the Los Angeles Times. "The Critic has nothing to do with TheSimpsons' world."

"This has been my worst fear ... that the Matt we know privately is going public," Brooks said. "He is a gifted, adorable, cuddly ingrate. But his behavior right now is rotten. And it's not pretty when a rich man acts like this."

It would be nearly 20 years before The Simpsons hosted another cast of characters in one of its episodes. However, this time it was another Groening creation—Futurama—stopping by for an episode in 2014’s “Simpsorama.”

6. ELIZABETH TAYLOR VOICED MAGGIE FOR ONE WORD.

Maggie is famous for her pacifier and 28-season vow of silence, but she did utter one word during the fourth season in the episode “Lisa’s First Word.” And the voice behind Maggie was none other than Elizabeth Taylor, who was hired to say one thing: “Daddy.”

The scene takes place at the end of the episode once Homer leaves Maggie’s room after tucking her in, so of course no one hears her. To get the line just right, producer Al Jean requested a number of takes from the Hollywood icon, culminating in Taylor telling Jean, “F--- you,” in her Maggie voice while the tapes were still rolling.

Taylor reappeared on the show toward the end of the fourth season in the episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled." She had a bit more to say here, but laying claim to Maggie’s first word cemented her legacy in Springfield.

7. THE SHOW HAS LANDED BOTH BANKSY AND THOMAS PYNCHON.

No one knows what Banksy’s real name is, and the mystery surrounding reclusive author Thomas Pynchon has endured for decades. Yet somehow, they both contributed to The Simpsons—Banksy with a couch gag and Pynchon as a guest-voice.

Pynchon appears (with a paper bag over his head to preserve his mystique) in two episodes, “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife,” where he endorses Marge’s book, and “All’s Fair in Oven War,” where he eats some chicken wings she made. He even edited his own dialogue for the show, removing a line where he was supposed to call Homer a fat ass. His reason? “Homer is my role model and I can't speak ill of him,” he told the producers.

Banksy’s couch gag was one of the show’s most shocking, depicting Fox as a vile corporate cesspool that runs on employee misery. Al Jean said he was a little concerned with the nature of the couch gag at first, but he and Groening agreed to leave it in with minimal changes. And no, nobody on The Simpsons ever met Banksy. In both cases, the reclusive artists were tracked down by casting director Bonnie Pietila.

8. HOMER MAKES LESS THAN $25,000 A YEAR AT THE NUCLEAR PLANT.

The Simpson family finances are ... complex. In some episodes, they have to forego fancy quilted toilet paper to make ends meet and, in others, Homer can pull wads of money out of his wallet if the plot calls for it. It’s all part of the show’s famous "rubber band reality," where continuity never lines up episode-to-episode (or scene-to-scene).

One of the only concrete pieces of evidence we have of the family’s financial situation comes in the episode “Much Apu About Nothing,” when we get a glimpse of Homer’s weekly paycheck from the nuclear plant.

Apparently Homer takes home $479. 60 before taxes ($362.19 after taxes) for a full work week, which averages out to just about $11.99 an hour. That’s $24,395 per year, and $37,416 when you adjust for inflation, according to Vox.

9. MICHAEL JACKSON VOICED A CHARACTER BUT HAD AN IMPRESSIONIST DO THE SINGING.

One of the most important parts of the early success of The Simpsons was the roster of A-list celebrities that provided guest voices for the series. This was at a time when a prime-time animated show wasn’t given much respect in show business, so having the likes of Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Larry King, Penny Marshall, and Phil Hartman lend their vocal talents to the show gave it an air of respectability that it needed.

Perhaps the biggest coup came during season three, when the show landed Michael Jackson as a guest. In “Stark Raving Dead,” Jackson plays a heavy-set, white mental patient who believes he’s the King of Pop and befriends the family after being Homer’s sanitarium cellmate. Jackson was a big Simpsons fan, so he was happy to lend his voice to the show. His speaking voice, that is.

Jackson refused to sing on the show when it came time for the episode’s musical number, instead leaving that up to a soundalike. When the cast discovered this during the episode’s table read, Harry Shearer (voice of Mr. Burns and many others) looked over at Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson) and said, “We’ve paid just enough for the speaking Michael Jackson but we can’t afford the singing Michael Jackson.”

When Jean asked why exactly Jackson didn’t want to sing on the show, the music legend told him, “I’m playing a joke on my brothers” with no further explanation.

Don’t go looking for Jackson’s name in the show’s closing credits, though. He appeared under the pseudonym John Jay Smith, which, again, was never explained.

10. THE SHOW’S MOST PROLIFIC WRITER IS NOTORIOUSLY RECLUSIVE.

The Simpsons has churned out a number of great comedy writers who have gone on to mainstream success—Conan O’Brien and The Office creator Greg Daniels among them—but there’s one whose legend eclipses nearly everyone else. Casual fans might not know him, but among Simpsons die-hards, the name John Swartzwelder is met with hushed awe. Multiple members of The Simpsons staff have declared him the best writer the show has ever seen, with former show writer Dan Greaney proclaiming him, "the greatest writer in the English language in any form."

Google his name and you’ll end up with more questions than answers. Most of the details of his life boil down to second- and third-hand accounts, as he never does interviews, refuses to lend his voice to DVD commentary tracks, and rarely pops up in photos (there are a handful on Google and none look any more recent than the ‘90s).

The one time that show producers tried to call him during a commentary recording, the man on the other end of the line ended the awkward conversation with, “It's too bad this isn’t really John Swartzwelder,” leaving fans to wonder what they just listened to. Despite that, the man wrote 59 episodes of the show during its first 15 seasons, with many of them ranking among the series’ most popular, like "Bart Gets an Elephant," "Radioactive Man," and "Homer's Enemy."

When other writers would talk about him in DVD commentaries, he's described as a serious Libertarian who is a “self-declared anti-environmentalist,” and would go on tangents about how there is more rainforest now than there was 100 years ago. And when describing a recycling center in one of his scripts, he called it "a couple of hippies surrounded by garbage." That didn't stop Swartzwelder from writing some of the show’s most environmentally conscious episodes, including “Whacking Day” and “The Old Man and the Lisa.”

How deep does Swartzwelder’s quirky legend go? During the commentary for “Grade School Confidential,” Groening told a story about how Swartzwelder would usually write his Simpsons scripts alone in a diner while smoking cigarettes and guzzling coffee. When California outlawed smoking in restaurants, Swartzwelder simply bought the booth, had it installed in his home, and continued to work in the exact same manner. And once smoking was banned in The Simpsons writers room, he rarely showed his face there again. The closest thing fans have gotten to actually seeing Swartzwelder is the handful of “cameos” he makes in animated form throughout the series’ history.

Though he’s been out of television since 2003, he has since authored a series of 11 novels, all of which retain his genius—and infinitely absurd—humor.

Additional sources: More Simpsons DVD commentaries than anyone should listen to in a lifetime.

This Smart Accessory Converts Your Instant Pot Into an Air Fryer

If you can make a recipe in a slow cooker, Dutch oven, or rice cooker, you can likely adapt it for an Instant Pot. Now, this all-in-one cooker can be converted into an air fryer with one handy accessory.

This Instant Pot air fryer lid—currently available on Amazon for $80—adds six new cooking functions to your 6-quart Instant Pot. You can select the air fry setting to get food hot and crispy fast, using as little as 2 tablespoons of oil. Other options include roast, bake, broil, dehydrate, and reheat.

Many dishes you would prepare in the oven or on the stovetop can be made in your Instant Pot when you switch out the lids. Chicken wings, French fries, and onion rings are just a few of the possibilities mentioned in the product description. And if you're used to frying being a hot, arduous process, this lid works without consuming a ton of energy or heating up your kitchen.

The lid comes with a multi-level air fry basket, a broiling and dehydrating tray, and a protective pad and storage cover. Check it out on Amazon.

For more clever ways to use your Instant Pot, take a look at these recipes.

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Q&A: Kristen Bell Celebrates Diversity In Her New Kid's Book, The World Needs More Purple People

Kristen Bell is one of those household names that brings to mind a seemingly endless list of outstanding performances in both TV and film. She is Veronica Mars. She is the very memorable Sarah Marshall. She's the voice of Gossip Girl. She just recently wrapped up her NBC series The Good Place. Your nieces and nephews likely know her as Princess Anna from the Frozen films. She also has one of the most uplifting and positive presences on social media.

Now, adding to her long list of accomplishments, Kristen Bell is the published author of a new children’s book called The World Needs More Purple People. Born out of seeing how cultural conversations were skewing more toward the things that divide us, the new picture book—which Bell co-authored with Benjamin Hart—encourages kids to see what unites us all as humans.

We spoke with Kristen Bell about what it means to be a purple person, her new animated series Central Park, and becoming a foster failure. We also put her knowledge of sloths to the test.

How did The World Needs More Purple People book come to be?

Basically my genius buddy, Ben Hart, and I were looking around and sort of seeing how our children were watching us debate healthily at the dinner table, which is fine. But it occurred to us that everything they were seeing was a disagreement. And that’s because that can be fun for adults, but it’s not a good basis for kids to start out on. We realized we were not really giving our kids a ton of examples of us, as adults, talking about the things that bring us together. So The World Needs More Purple People was born.

We decided to create a roadmap of similarities to give kids a jumping off point of how to look for similarities ... [because] if you can see similarities, you’re more likely to walk through the world with an open mind. But if you walk into a conversation seeing only differences, your mind is going to think differently of that person’s opinion and you just never know when you’re going to hear an opinion that might enlighten you. So we wanted to give kids this roadmap to follow to basically say, “Here are some great features that no one can argue with. Have these features and you’ll have similarities with almost everyone on the planet.”

Part of the reason I love the book so much is because it encourages kids to ask questions, even if they're silly. What are some silly questions you’ve had to answer for your kids?

Oh my god. How much time do you have? Once she asked in rapid fire: Is Santa Claus real? Why is Earth? Who made dogs?

How do you even answer that?

It was too much; I had to walk away. Kids have a ton of questions, and as they get older and more verbal, the funny thing that happens is they get more insecure. So we wanted to encourage the question-asking, and also encourage the uniqueness of every child. Which is why Dan Wiseman, who did our illustrations, really captured this middle point between Ben and I. Ben is very sincere, and I am very quirky. And I feel like the illustrations were captured brilliantly because we also wanted a ton of diversity because that is what the book is about.

The book is about seeing different things and finding similarities. Each kid in the book looks a little bit different, but also a little bit the same. The message at the end of the book is with all these features that you can point out and recognize in other people—loving to laugh, working really hard, asking great questions ... also know that being a purple person means being uniquely you in the hopes that kids will recognize that purple people come in every color.

What was it like behind-the-scenes of writing a children’s book with two little girls at home? Were they tough critics?

Shockingly, no. They did not have much interest in the fact that I was writing a children’s book until there were pictures. Then they were like, “Oh now I get it.” But prior to that, when I’d run the ideas by them, they were not as interested. But I did read it to them. They gave me the two thumbs up. Ben has two kids as well, and all our kids are different ages. Once we got the thumbs up from the 5-year-old, the 7-year-old, the 8-year-old, and the 11-year-old, we thought, “OK, this is good to go.”

I hope that people, and kids especially, really do apply this as a concept. We would love to see this as a curriculum going into schools if they wanted to use it to ask: What happened today in your life that was purple? What could you do to make tomorrow more purple? Like as a concept of a way of living.

Weirdly, writing a children’s book was a way of getting to the adults. If it’s a children’s book, there is a high probability an adult is going to either be reading it to you or be there while you’re reading it—which means you’re getting two demographics. If we had just written a novel about this kind of concept, we’d never reach the kids. But by writing a kid's book, we also access the adults.

Your new show Central Park looks so incredible. What can you tell us about the show and your character Molly?

I am so excited for the show to come out. I’ve seen it and it is exceptional. It is so, so, so funny and so much fun. I signed on because I got a phone call from my friend Josh Gad, who said, “I’m going to try to put together a cartoon for us to work on.” And I said, “Yes. Goodbye.” And he and Loren Bochard, who created Bob’s Burgers, took basically all of our friends—Leslie Odom Jr., Stanley Tucci, Kathryn Hahn, Tituss Burgess, Daveed Diggs, and myself—and created a family who lives in the middle of Central Park.

I play a teenager named Molly who is very socially awkward but has this incredible, relentlessly creative, vivacious personality going on only inside her head … and it’s a musical! So, she's awkward on the outside but when she sings her songs she really comes to life. And she's a comic book artist, so the cartoon often switches to what she's seeing in her head.

It's so funny and Josh Gad plays this busker who lives in Central Park, who is the narrator. Stanley Tucci plays this older woman named Bitsy who is trying to build a shopping mall in the center of Central Park, and the family’s job is to basically save Central Park. But the music is so incredible. We’ve got two music writers, Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel, who write the majority of the music, but we also have guest writers that come in every episode. So Sara Bareilles wrote some music and Cyndi Lauper wrote some music. It is such a fun show.

My husband, who does not like cartoons or musicals, watched the first couple of episodes, and he looked at me and said, “You’ve got something really special in your hands.” And he doesn’t like anything. It made me so happy. I cannot wait until this show comes out, I am so proud of it.

What was it like to reunite with Josh Gad on another musical animated series that isn't Frozen?

Josh and I talk a lot, and we had a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations about how we can work together again, just because we adore each other. And part of it is because we get along socially, and part of it is because we trust each other comedically. He's a creator and writer more so than I am, so I usually leave it up to him and say, "What’s our next project?" We have other things in the pipeline we would love to do together, but [Central Park] was an immediate yes because I trust how he writes. Josh is at every single one of my recording sessions; he is very hands-on with the shows that he does or produces or creates. I trust him as much as I trust my husband, creatively, and that’s saying a lot.

Given your well-documented love of sloths, we do have to throw out a few true or false questions about sloths and put your knowledge to the test …

Oh my gosh. OK, now I'm nervous. Hit me.

True or false: Sloths fart more than humans.

Fart more than humans?

Yes.

I’m going to say it's true.

It’s actually false. Sloths don’t fart at all. They might be the only mammal on the planet that does not fart.

You’re kidding. Another reason to love them. You know, I was trying to think medically about it. I know they only poop once a week and that if you only go poop once a week ... I thought, “Well in order to keep your GI healthy, perhaps you have to have some sort of flow from the top to the bottom during the seven-day waiting period until you release.”

True or false: Sloths are so slow that algae sometimes grows on them.

One hundred percent true. In the wild, they’re always covered in algae and it helps their fur, all those microorganisms. But in zoos, they don’t have it.

Nice. OK, last one. True or false: Sloths poop from trees.

No way. They go down to the ground, and they rub their little tushies on the ground, and then they go back up.

You are correct.

I know a fair amount about sloths but the farting thing was new. My kids will be excited to hear that.

We heard recently that you are a part of the “foster failure” club. What went wrong? Er—right?

Well, what I learned from Veronica Mars is you root for and cherish and uplift the underdog always. And my first foster failure was in 2018; I found the most undesirable dog that existed on the planet. She is made of toothpicks, it is impossible for her to gain weight. She has one eye. She looks like a walking piece of garbage. Her name is Barbara. She's 11 years old. And I saw a picture of her online and I said, “Yes. I just want to bring her over. I don’t even need to know anything else about her other than this picture," which was the most hideous picture. I mean it looks like a Rorschach painting or something. It was so awful. I was like, “She’s mine. I’ll take care of her. I’ve got this.” And it turns out she is quite lovely even though she can be pretty annoying. But she is our Barbara Biscuit, and she is one of the most charismatic dogs I have ever met. She piddles wherever she damn well pleases. So that is a bummer, because she is untrainable, but we love her.

That was our first failure. Then last year, we genuinely attempted to just foster a dog named Frank. And about two weeks in, I realized Frank was in love with me—like in a human way. He thought he was my boyfriend.

Oh no …

I just felt like … I didn’t even want a new dog—well I shouldn’t say that, because I always want all the dogs—but we weren’t planning on getting a new dog. But I had to have a conversation with my family and I said, “I think it’s going to be like child separation if I separate him. We have to keep him.” And sure enough, he can’t be more than two feet from me at any time during the day.

Does he still give you “the eyes”?

Oh my gosh. Bedroom eyes all day long. I can’t sit down without him like … not even just sitting comfortably in my lap. He has to have my arm in his mouth or part of my hair in his mouth. He’s trying to get back in my womb or something.

That’s love.

Yeah, I said, “What am I going to do? The guy is in love with me. He can live here.” So there is foster failure number two.

Wow, so it’s Frank and Barbara.

Frank and Barbara. And we also have Lola, a 17-year-old corgi-chow chow mix. Who I have had since she was one-and-a-half, who was also a pound puppy. She is our queen bee.

Before you go, we do this thing on Twitter called #HappyHour, where we ask our followers some get-to-know-you questions. If you could change one rule in any board game, what would it be?

I am obviously going to Catan ... oh I know exactly what I would do. In Catan, I would allow participants to buy a city without buying a settlement first. In Catan, you have to upgrade from a settlement to a city first, which is a waste of cards. If you have the cards for a city, you should be able to buy a city.